did help build this business. Hopefully, we will get through this, and when he gets back, we will settle everything.”
“So, what are we supposed to do, while our father runs around Mexico looking for a magic mirror? Why did you have us come over here, Ellie?” I said.
“I wanted to tell you to your face, and I want you all to understand that I do not want this anymore. You take it on. I will hold down the business for as long as I can. But he is your father, and that is your responsibility. I do not want him calling me anymore. You become his go-to person, Julian, or John.”
“Hell, he can evaporate with the spirit into the steamy jungle, for all I care,” Johnny said.
“You do not mean that,” Thuy said. “He is your father.”
“You have no idea, Sweetheart,” Johnny said. “I am done with him.”
“I hear you, Ellie,” I said. “It is off your shoulders.”
In the car, heading up Barham Boulevard back to Buena Vista, Johnny turned to me in the back seat. “Well, little Brainiac, what do we do about Gordon Laigle?”
“To quote the true wizard, the wise and wonderful Rosa Suarez Laigle: ‘Let it be.’ Dad and the mirror have their own fates. Stay clear, I say. Besides, what can we do about it anyway?”
What took me over to North Screenland Drive, I do not really know. Well, I do know. Thuy. She drove me in her Corolla, with the understanding that we leave Johnny out of it, which is where he wanted to be.
It was how my father described knowing what Jose Maria in the mirror wanted, something told me to go over there. I felt it in my bones. It was my intuition, my inner voice. I had to know and I was compelled to find out.
On the way over to our old house, Thuy told me that her grandmother talked about a spirit that guarded her village in Vietnam when she was a girl. “Anything that happened, good or bad, it was because of the spirit,” she said.
“How could they ever really know what the spirit wanted?” I said.
“Precisely!”
We stopped at the curb in front 1508 North Screenland. I knew the Swopes, the family that bought our old house. I played soccer with the son, Stewie, in the sixth grade. In fact, my father was the selling agent in the transaction. I did not have the Swopes’s phone number, but I thought that they wouldn’t mind if I dropped by. Just for a minute. Then, I would make a request for a quick bathroom visit.
It had been a month since Ellie called us over to my Dad’s office to say that she was out of Gordon’s escapades. I didn’t know if she had, but I had not heard another word from our father. As far as I knew, he was still chasing Jose Maria around southeastern Mexico. I did not know the state of his real estate business, but I knew my father’s life would never be the same. I also knew that Mom went to court and won substantial spousal and child support from him, based on his recent earnings, my testimony, and the fact that he was a no-show at the hearing. She had already found a large, sunny three-bedroom apartment at the top of Orange Grove Avenue in the Burbank hills, although she was spending time in Marina Del Rey, on Karl’s sailboat.
With my father still MIA, I had to know for myself. It was based on a revelation that I had not forgotten, after sharing it with captive Gordon in the car alongside the San Diego Freeway. Thuy turned off her car. Our old house was set back from the street behind a low, black, iron fence and screening shrubs. While Thuy posed as the get-away driver, I went up to the gate. I looked toward the windows of the house, in case some Swope inside might spot me and come out in welcome. Nothing stirred. I opened the squeaky gate and moved up the cement walkway toward the porch, fifty feet back. On the driveway of the house next door, Michael Palmer stood and watched me. Michael was retarded (our special friend, as we referred to him), a portly man in his early-forties, whom I had known my whole life. He had his hand flat over his eyebrows, shading his eyes. He watched me walk by. “Hi, Michael,” I said, waving. He waved back, from the wrist.
On the porch, I stepped heavily, to again flush out a greeter. I knocked on the aluminum screen door, waited, and knocked again. After no response, I pushed my fingertip on the doorbell button. The “dong-dong, dong-dong” that drove our old dog, Trigger, crazy came back to me from inside. I waited. Nobody was home.
The room I wanted to look into was our old den, on the other side of the house, along the alley. I could have had Thuy pull right up to the window, got out of the car, and peered inside the room. But, if someone had been home and in the den, my face peeking in could have caused alarm. A screaming Swope might sink my mission. And I did not want my brother’s girlfriend too involved with what I was planning.
I came down the three cement steps of the front porch. It was the same steps that I had dived into, chasing a broom that Johnny was teasing me with when I was seven. I landed forehead-first on the corner of the top step and got a ride to the ER and three stitches. Off the porch, I stepped on to the lawn of the front yard, where Johnny and I used to skulk around, pretending we were superheroes, and played hide-and-seek with our friends from the neighborhood. I crossed in front of the house and bent under the low-hanging limb of the elm tree that I had helped my father plant probably ten years before, with my red pail and miniature yellow plastic shovel. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Michael still stood on his driveway. He was gone. I walked through the side gate and into the alley. The den, between the gate and the garage, had a large window with thirty-two one-foot-by-one-foot glass panes in it. Brown curtains were drawn over the window, with a crack where the two sides met in the middle. I stepped to the window. I turned my head and looked up and down the alley for anyone walking or driving by. It was empty. Behind, twelve shaded windows from two levels of the apartment building next door faced me. I scanned them but saw no one spying. I turned back to the window of the den. I pressed my forehead against its clear cool panes. I waited while my eyes adjusted to the difference in light. I looked directly across the room. Above a low table, against the same wall in the same spot where it had hung for years, was the black obsidian disk. I stared at it, rapt. I heard a car engine somewhere but let it go. I could not take my eyes off the disk. A light rose in the room, as if the car lights shone from behind, and glanced off the dusky surface of the disk. I noticed a glint in its barely concave surface. I turned from the window, expecting to see Thuy, pointing her car grille at me. The alley was clear and quiet. I walked to the gate next to the garage. I thought that Thuy must have wondered what happened to me. I pulled open the gate, and went into the back yard and up on to the porch. My mother said to let it be, but something told me to grab the gold knob and see if the back door was unlocked. It turned all the way to the right.
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